Bristol squares aim to stub out cigarettes with voluntary outdoor smoking ban
Two busy harbourside squares are to become the UK’s first major outdoor spaces to become smoking-free zones from Monday.
Millennium Square and Anchor Square in Bristol, which are popular family destinations and often host cultural events, are to be turned into voluntary cigarette-, cigar- and pipe-free areas.
No formal, enforceable ban will be imposed but 11 signs dotted around the squares will ask smokers not to light up and thank people for helping “keep Bristol smoke-free, healthy and clean”
Listen, you cretins, there's no such thing as a "voluntary ban". It's Orwellian gobbledegook. By their very nature, bans require submission, enforcement and punishment. Calling a ban voluntary makes about as much sense as calling an authoritarian a liberal.
Okay, that's a bad example, but you'd think tobacco control fanatics, of all people, would know what a ban is. Every policy they ever lobby for involves one.
It comes as no surprise to find that this little slice of health fascism is the brainchild of the 100 per cent taxpayer-funded front group Smokefree SouthWest.
Kate Knight, deputy director of the group, which is commissioned by 15 public health teams across the region, said the scheme would be “self-policing”.
Ha ha! Good luck with that. I hope the people of Bristol make a point of chain-smoking in these areas as soon as they find out that this pseudo-prohibition has been sprung on them.
Knight accepted that it would inconvenience some customers of the bars and restaurants in the squares. “But it only takes them about 20 seconds to walk out of the squares. We don’t want to make the lives of smokers hell.”
Really? In that case, Kate, you have about as much understanding of the consequences of your actions as you do of the meaning of words.
You go ahead and have your pretend ban, the people of Bristol can pretend to obey it, and we'll pretend you're not a parasitic, hateful, puritanical, freedom-hating arm of the government.
